Thomas and Beal in the Midi

by Christopher Tilghman

  He took her hand and gave it a squeeze. “Yes,” he said. “Most of cooking is mean, even to the vegetables.”

  He spooned out the cassoulet, taking a bite while Beal took a sip of the broth; it was smoky, tasty, reminding him of the stews Aunt Zoe cooked, which always started with a pig’s foot or a rind of ham.

  “Fred Shippen is leaving,” said Thomas. He had heard this the day before. “His mother is ill, and he has to go back to Virginia. I know you don’t like him very much, but I’m going to miss him.” Yes, Fred had been courteous to Beal in a studied way, but he remained a Virginian at heart; no question which side he’d have been fighting for in the war. But then again, Thomas’s grandfather, the famous Duke, had been one of the most notorious Confederates on the Eastern Shore, had spent a few months locked up in the Union prison at Fort McHenry, and both of Thomas’s uncles, his mother’s brothers, had died fighting for the South.

  “I’m sorry,” Beal said.

  “It’s all right. I don’t want anyone else in my life but you.”

  “Oh, Thomas. I’m just your wife. You need more than just me. What about those men in the reading room?” He had mentioned a couple of brief conversations he had at Galignani’s, though the truth was, he’d said hardly a word to any of them. The crew at Galignani’s was really the worst of the lot, the people Mother Digby despised, the kind of idle and worthless Americans she had figured him for.

  “It doesn’t matter. Come summer, we will be gone from here. We can’t afford it anyway.”

  “Yes. Sometimes I worry about that,” she said.

  Thomas knew well that this was a brand-new sensation for her. For her family, what they could afford had never been an issue at all. “Don’t,” he said.

  She took a few bites. “But where will we go?”

  “To the Midi, I think. By the Mediterranean. That’s why I was talking to Mme Vigny about it. I have been reading about it.” He was paying out a lot of rope here; he tried not to make it too obvious how far along all this had gone. Yes, he thought: they would go south, and that would end this adventure.

  “What would we be doing?” she asked.

  “Well. Farming. Maybe grapes. It’s what they do in the South. It’s what we know how to do, right?”

  “I guess.” It was what they were born into, but the farming they knew about had been a disaster; things planted and harvested seemed to be about dying. “I’m sure you will tell me about it when the time is right.”

  “Yes. Of course.” It was obvious to him that she did not want to talk about the future, to face it, any more than he did. He took her hand, and this time, having rebuffed him, she clasped his with both of hers.

  “I’m really proud of what you’re doing,” he said. “All your writing. Randall would be proud of you too.”

  “My husband,” she said, a slightly odd comment, as if she were saying this to herself.

  My husband. For some reason, this simple phrase kept returning to him as he slept, and he woke with it on his mind. He set out as usual in the morning. By now he was working at another library, yet he often stopped in to say hello to Eileen, as her boss did not come in until noon and there were never any readers in the den. But as he crossed the rue de Rivoli on his way to the rue Tronchet, he glanced down the arcade and thought of Eileen sitting there, waiting, and all at once the whole spot he had put himself into broke his heart. Because of course he let himself think of her the way lovers do: How could anyone not love her? Because he would do almost anything to keep her in his life, as one cherished so dearly, except hurt her. At that moment he did not reflect on any hurt that Beal might experience; she was not part of this equation simply because she would have no role in hurting Eileen. He stopped in the street abruptly enough to force a man to jump to avoid smacking into him, and because he needed something, anything, to give him a pause, he forced his gaze up ahead at the Madeleine, a Napoleonic embarrassment no one really knew what to do with, a building, like a life, born into confusion. He had been evil, he had been cruel. He had known for weeks that she hoped blamelessly that there could be more between them, that at night, in her apartment not far from the peach orchards on Montreuil, she had imagined a life together. This had never been possible, would never be. He had the love of his life with Beal, a love that had literally, for him, moved continents, but there was something so plain and easy about Eileen—no continents being moved here, just two people washed up together in Paris—that a few times he had absently imagined the same thing. This life he and Beal were living seemed to allow this sort of illict rêverie; Paris allowed it, even encouraged it, and it couldn’t be. Sometime soon he would speak to Eileen, but for now, Thomas decided as he stood on that spot on the rue Royale, it was time to get serious, time to cut out this fey research and move on to the future, time to leave this city before it destroyed them.

  * * *

  Beal had not agreed, but she had not refused. She had not agreed to do this painting with Arthur Kravitz, and she had not agreed to meet Touré at his café. But she had not refused either. It seemed that neither of them would let her go, no matter what she said or did. Touré would go back to the café the following week, she knew that now, and she schemed that she would not, that she would make him wait all afternoon in vain, and she counted down the days, telling herself that she would not give in, that it would be fine come Tuesday afternoon to imagine him drumming his fingers angrily. He’d come looking for her, she knew that, to the Louvre, to the avenue Bosquet. A couple of times she came close to telling Thomas about him, this man from the boat, that African you noticed, he’s bothering me, but it seemed late for that. She should have told Thomas about him after that first dinner, but even then Touré seemed to be her own problem, something confined to the steerage dining salon, a private affair. And besides, she believed that Touré would never reveal himself to Thomas, that in many ways to do so would be, for Touré, to admit a disadvantage. He wouldn’t come to their door; he’d stand at the head of the avenue—his hands on his hips—and Thomas wouldn’t pay him any mind if he noticed him, and Beal would know he was there.

  But then there was the red-haired girl. Oh, Beal remembered well enough Miss Ophelia’s red hair; they called her “witch,” they called her “the red Devil.” What could there be to this? Beal wondered. Thomas had made it clear enough that he didn’t really like her friends, Colleen and, especially, Hilary; something had happened at that dinner, but more than that, he just didn’t seem to notice other women. On their walks she’d say, Now isn’t that lady right pretty, and he’d glance but do no more than that. He had told her a good bit about Galignani’s but had never mentioned much about the other people there, and when, at one point during that week, she asked him straight on who he talked to, he said he just talked to the librarians. And then she said she’d love to see this place where he was spending so much time, and he answered that these days he was spending more time at the Bibliothèque Universelle and he’d be happy to show it to her. So maybe that was that with the red-haired girl, and maybe it all meant nothing, but Beal could not get that moment with Touré out of her mind, and it made her angry that Thomas had given him more power over her.

  This winter, it seemed to Beal, was in some way out of time, a kind of adventure time that wouldn’t count on the calendar or against her lifetime, and after all, she deserved—they deserved, she corrected herself—this winter of change. Who was she? The farm girl who had come to the great city of Paris: it sounded like some of those books she’d heard Hilary and Colleen talking about, by Balzac, Zola. But still, this struggle seemed uniquely hers, not Thomas’s. Beal knew that he had some project going, that he was doing what, as she understood it, his father had done all those years in his lonely study in the Retreat: reading, researching, looking for answers to the yellows. She’d asked Thomas what he was studying, and he told her he wasn’t ready to talk about it. She’d asked him, as straight as she could, about the red-haired girl, and he had said nothing. So maybe they both had sec
rets, and maybe that was fine in a marriage, to have secrets.

  So, that next Tuesday, she met M. Touré. This time he was neither angry nor ingratiating; he seemed simply pleased to see her.

  “I wasn’t going to come,” she said.

  “I wasn’t sure you would, but I knew you had nothing to fear from me. I mean to give you only pleasure.”

  She took off her gloves and coat and sat down. The café was almost stiflingly hot: a joy. This was the warmest she had felt in weeks, and with the strains of the tobacco of many lands mingling and twining above the tables, the air was almost herbal, lavender and rosemary. As soon as she sat, she wanted to abide in this comfort forever.

  Touré had brought along a book about Senegal, which was in French, but he told her about his life as he thumbed through the photographs of the city of Dakar, the broad Senegal River, the mosques and markets, the beaches, the groundnut plantations. The land was flat, like the Eastern Shore of Maryland, but in some of the photographs Beal could see distant mountains, and on the coast, the sea seemed endless and restless and deep, unlike the brackish and confined waters of the Chesapeake. The people all looked extremely content with their lot and their work, and nowhere was there a white boss or foreman or overseer. Touré was boyishly proud of this little country; he missed his home. Beal understood that without any difficulty. Here he was in Paris, in this freezing, biting wind, so far from the fragrant breeze, the soul-reviving heat, a man alone in a harsh land. She looked over at him, and in this mood his features appeared soft; he even seemed a bit confused, less certain of everything. She felt bad for having plotted all week to stand him up. How would he have felt, bringing this book to show her and then waiting for her in vain? She exhaled, a breath drawn from deep in her chest, and with it went the coil of tension that had been inside her all week. She’d really thought of little else at the Louvre, at home, falling asleep beside Thomas, and here she didn’t have to look over her shoulder in fear, because Touré was right in front of her.

  “I would like to continue seeing you,” he said after he had closed the book and after she said she must go. “This will not be difficult for you to arrange.”

  It was delivered in the form of an order, like so much of what he had been saying to her since that first night in the steerage dining salon. A crude demand that brooked no dissent. Except that this time Beal heard a different tone, a kind of awkwardness that may have been the result of speaking in his third language, or it may have been the way men talked to women in his country, or it may have just been that this was a lonely man who didn’t know how to ask nicely. How to say please. As quickly as that, her ire could melt into tenderness. If he had been offering and asking for friendship in some nicer way all along, wouldn’t she have returned it willingly? Wasn’t she curious about this unknown part of her being: Africa? How could she not be curious? “Okay,” she said. He looked confused at the word. “D’accord,” she said, and he brightened.

  “Ah.”

  “But you will not threaten me. You will keep away from me.”

  “Of course. As you wish.”

  She wanted to say something about loving Thomas, about being faithful to him, but she knew that if that were an issue, she should end this right now. So she didn’t say anything about Thomas, and with that, she could feel that a great unknown had taken over the part of her life outside her marriage, like stepping on one of those trapdoors in the barns at home and falling through, landing not with a soft bump on a pile of hay below, but far away from the Retreat, farther away than she had ever imagined. “I do wish it,” she said, which, in the absence of anything more steadfast, had to do. She had the sense that if she pushed harder, he’d lose the softness, and for the moment, she had decided on a different path. She would encourage this better part of the man and see where it led. There was nothing disloyal to Thomas in that. “I will meet you here next week,” she said, standing up, and he rose to help her with her coat.

  “You delight me, Mademoiselle Beal,” he said, a whisper from behind, close enough to her ear to feel the warmth of his breath.

  A week later, after meeting in the café, she went to Diallo’s rooms. He wanted her to see how a real African lives in the city; they were just around the corner from the café; there was no bother to it. For reasons she did not understand, she accepted. When she got there, she found nothing African about it, nothing but the same bare washstand, meager table, barely warm stove, empty larder that she knew was in every other apartment of this type all over the city, all over Europe. And the same narrow bed. She was not naive; she wasn’t even blameless.

  On the way, she had asked herself if she was willing to let him make love to her, whether she would use that door to step into this promised land he kept insisting was waiting for her, a place beyond her constricted, Americanized, enslaved ability to imagine. She knew he believed that sex with him was her duty, but also that it would purify her, wash her of that white man—not her husband. He refused to accept that Thomas was her husband—whom she lay with night after night. She knew he believed that taking his semen would cleanse her blood of the whiteness that had seeped into her family in America.

  When they climbed to the top of the stairs, he went ahead and then turned to greet her, as if she were paying a call. He was charming, once again revealing that childish sense of pride, which was confusing, because, in truth, what he was proud of was not what was African about these rooms, but that they were Parisian, that out of the front window he could see the roofs of the great belly of Paris, Les Halles. He denied this pride. “We must make do, after all. But these are not the sights I will show you in Senegal.” There was no one else in the apartment. He walked her to the kitchen, suggested that she warm up next to the stove for a few minutes. Yes, he was saying, let’s warm our hands and feet before we undress.

  He had not showed her his room, though the door was ajar and through it she could see the foot of his bed. This bed. It seemed to Beal, almost as a hallucination, that this bed was Africa itself, or that this was the way Touré saw it—that this bed where an African slept was the Africa he wanted her to see. Then he was standing over her, as he so often did, and what came to her was not the no! she wished had come, but rather, the mealier not yet. The not yet that could get her out of this apartment intact but not completely free; the not yet that offered a decision by way of not deciding anything. Still, it was enough to give her the determination to resist.

  “Now, Mademoiselle Beal, I will make you my wife.”

  “No,” she said. “I’m leaving.” She turned from the stove and moved toward the door, and he placed one hand on the wall in front of her to block her way.

  “You know you want this. You have agreed.”

  “I haven’t agreed. Please put your arm down.”

  “You cannot do this to a man. An African woman does not do this to a man.”

  “Then you would force her whether she wanted it or not?” she asked, suddenly calm and very certain of her argument. “You would force me? How is that different from the white man you say must have forced a mother of mine way back? How is that different from the slavers who brought my people to America?”

  “This is not about these silly words,” he said. She had twisted his arguments and intentions, and he was angry; he seemed to be fighting his own arms, as if the contradictions she was feeding him could make him explode. “You have been coming to me for my counsel and guidance for months, and now I am telling you what you must do.”

  And here something further happened to her, when the not yet became, at least provisionally, never! Never was somewhere between yes and no; it was the answer to a different question altogether. Never did not really require a choice, it was simply a fact. And now she was ready to put up a fight. That much of the farm girl was still within, the part of farm life where everything gets decided by physical means—a chore, a desire, a conflict. She took him on, looking straight at him. “You don’t have any idea why I have agreed to see you. You don’t kno
w nothing about me.”

  The thought that he should know anything about her beyond what he had imposed on her seemed to give him the barest moment’s pause, as if, despite the fact that he was dismissing her defense as mere rhetoric, there was a flaw in his logic that he must address. He did not put his arm down, but he relaxed it, and she ducked under it.

  “All right,” he said. “We will go on as before. You will determine the time and place.”

  * * *

  In the beginning of April, when spring had finally arrived for real and a season’s worth of chill had begun to dissipate in Arthur’s studio, Beal appeared at his door. She had brought a companion with her, a French mademoiselle named Céleste. Arthur was a little disappointed that it wasn’t her husband accompanying her; he wanted that edge of subterfuge in the air, but this plain, mousy Céleste brought in a clueless and unsuspecting innocence, which was good too. In either case, a chaperone made everything vastly easier. The girl was dressed in proper daytime attire. There had been no discussion of costume, of formal gown or mythic drape, no mention of necklines, no suggestion of disrobing of any kind. Arthur knew that if they ever got to something more staged, it wouldn’t be this first time, and he didn’t press it. He invited them in, straightened his cot so the French girl could sit on it without coming into contact with his filthy bed linen, and then pointed over at the chair. Beal went to it as he settled onto his stool, charcoal and drawing paper in hand.

  “Okay,” she said. “Here I am. You win.” Arthur assumed that Céleste spoke no English.

  “I’m not trying to win. I just want to paint you.”

  She shrugged. This whole relationship was turning into a contest of shrugs, and he liked this latest one especially: imperious but powerless. “What do I do?” she asked. “What does a model do?”

  “Just sit still. It’s pretty easy.”

  She sat, put her hands in her lap stiffly and impatiently, as if she were in a depot waiting for a train. Okay, thought Arthur, picking up his charcoal. I can work with this. And over the next several visits, he did. He had her stand, posed her this way and that, waiting, hoping. He showed her nothing even though he knew she was curious. Who would not be curious? He didn’t care what they talked about. On the first sitting, after she had settled in a bit, she asked him why he was doing this, and he understood that she wasn’t asking about painting her or blackmailing her, but why he did art, what was he after? What tiny purchase on truth did he think he had in the very point of his pencil, the fleece at the tip of his brush, what to be found there? She uttered none of this, but that was what she meant, in a rather hostile way.